As a designer concerned about climate change, Asa Highsmith is passionate about providing alternatives to car-dependent suburbia in Oklahoma City, where his firm, Common Works Architects, is based.
The links between global warming and car-centric urban sprawl are well established. In a 2013 study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that households in U.S. suburbs have significantly higher levels of planet-warming emissions than those in city centers. Household transportation emissions, in particular, are higher in the suburbs because people there generally drive instead of walking, biking, or taking public transportation.
In Oklahoma City, many of Highsmith’s peers in development circles and the local government are also pushing to densify neighborhoods and reduce car dependency. But even with this momentum behind it, Common Works Architects sometimes struggles to make its designs a reality.
Parking is one common sticking point. In the past few years, the topic has emerged as a priority for advocates of high-quality urbanism, who argue that an over-provision of parking spaces impedes walkability, leads to greater driving, and raises housing costs, among other challenges. But when Highsmith tries to include fewer than normal parking spots in his projects, he often encounters resistance.
“I can convince the approvals department at Oklahoma City that we should be allowed to do less parking, and I can even sometimes convince my client that we need less parking,” he said. But when commercial lenders enter the picture, they often balk at this proposal.
For one project, a multifamily housing development located across the street from a large grocery store in an amenity-rich neighborhood near downtown Oklahoma City, lenders refused to finance the building unless Common Works Architects changed its design to include at least 28 parking spots. This necessitated major alterations such as the addition of a parking lot and a driveway bisecting the site. The significant cost of these changes ate into the funds the development team had planned to spend on buildings, forcing it to reduce the number of apartment units, Highsmith said.
“A lot of people think that the developer or the client gets final say on all decisions on a project, but 99% of development is private, and 99% of that is based on some kind of commercial loan or lending,” he said. “That means that really the final, final say on any decision – even design, even aesthetics – we get comments from some invisible bank board.”
Highsmith’s experience with lenders is not unique. Matthew Adair, a doctoral candidate in urban planning at McGill University, recently interviewed 50 people involved in financing multifamily housing across the United States for his dissertation. He found that commercial lenders’ laser focus on minimizing risk in their investments frequently prevents new ideas from taking hold in development.
“The industry is not well positioned to innovate with housing, because they really just want to finance what has been built before,” Adair said. “Their most ideal project is building the same project that already exists on the same block, because those conditions have been proven to succeed, and they can look at the profit margins for that project and see that it’s been successful.”
Sprawl begets sprawl
Many Americans would prefer to live in communities where they can walk to destinations like schools, stores, and restaurants, but only a tiny fraction of the nation’s developed land fits this description. As a result, real estate is generally significantly more expensive in walkable areas than in car-dependent suburbs, putting this lifestyle out of reach for most people who want it. But as Highsmith has found, many people encounter barriers when they try to create developments that would make more neighborhoods walkable.
According to Susan Handy, director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis, car-dependent sprawl has been the default urban form for so long in the U.S. that it’s firmly baked into every aspect of the development process.
“We’re doing it because that is what we’ve been doing for a century,” she said. “It’s built into policies, practices, zoning codes, design standards … But it’s also just what people are used to doing.”
This is true for most players involved in the complex process of planning, building, and operating cities.
“It’s this whole system, on the public-sector side, on the private-sector side, that conspires to replicate this car-oriented suburban development that is pervasive across the U.S.,” Handy said.
Jonathan Rosenbloom, a law professor at Albany Law School who leads the nonprofit organization Sustainable Development Code, agrees that the nation’s long history of suburban development is key to understanding the current paradigm.
“Eisenhower’s highway system [in the 1950s] was one of the first singular major steps, but even before that, we had 40 years of minor steps pushing into the suburbs,” he said.
Over the decades, a robust network of interdependent processes and players has evolved to propagate this model.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh yeah, this policy here is in place and that’s what’s doing it,’” Rosenbloom said. “Rather, it’s a system of dozens of different parts in the local, the state, and the federal system, whether we’re talking about tax or land use or real estate or infrastructure. Many of those things are pushing to make it more efficient for developers to develop in this way.”
Who’s responsible for improving walkability?
The systemic nature of the challenge often leads to finger-pointing, Rosenbloom said. For example, some city governments say that they lack funds to take vital steps like improving public transportation because of federal policies that allow large nonprofit urban landowners – universities and hospitals, for example – to avoid paying property taxes. In the absence of changes to federal tax policy, they say, there’s nothing they can do.
Overcoming challenges like these will require a wide spectrum of different groups to collaborate more effectively. When 1000 Friends of Oregon, a nonprofit focused on land use in Oregon, wanted to understand why efforts to build dense developments around public transportation hubs (also known as transit-oriented development, or TOD) in Portland were floundering, it reviewed studies of similar projects from around the world and interviewed people involved in local efforts. The resulting report said that strong relationships were critical.
“The first barrier to TOD policy development and implementation identified in the literature, and by far the most common between articles, is stakeholder relationships,” wrote author Jonathan Chenchar.
But improving collaboration between different groups isn’t enough to create meaningful change; the myriad stakeholders involved in city-building also need to evolve. This could necessitate significant changes for a wide range of groups: municipalities, state transportation departments, federal agencies, banks, developers, designers, and more.
Rosenbloom believes that city governments, in particular, could do much more to support the creation of walkable communities.
“It’s my belief that the authority that local governments have is vastly larger than the authority that local governments exercise,” he said.
Zoning is a clear example, he said. Most communities still rely on century-old land-use regulations that ban the development of anything other than low-rise, car-dependent suburbs in most places. In many U.S. cities, it’s illegal to build anything other than single-family houses on 75% or more of the land zoned for residential use.
“There are, without a doubt, some local governments that have done some really creative things [with zoning], but for the most part it’s still the same thing,” Rosenbloom said.
Transportation planners can also do more, Handy said. Instead of focusing on minimizing traffic congestion – traditionally their main goal, and one they’ve tackled primarily by devoting an ever-growing amount of land to cars – they can direct their energy toward helping people easily meet their needs. This shift in focus could lead to radically different transportation solutions, enabling people to use different travel modes for different purposes instead of promoting a one-size-fits-all approach based on driving.
While many transportation planners agree that this shift is needed, too little has been done to realize it, Handy said.
“While there is a lot of new thinking out there, there’s very little abandonment of the old way of thinking,” she said.
As a result, the profession has adopted an everything-at-once approach, investing in public transportation while continuing to widen highways.
“And then we wonder, ‘Why aren’t we getting better ridership on transit?’” she said. “Well, we put a ton of money into it, but we’re still putting more money into the highways, so of course that’s what people are going to continue to [use].”
Developers also need to evolve, Handy said. Today, many companies specialize in residential development, particularly for single-family housing, or in commercial properties like suburban shopping malls. To create walkable communities, more developers will need to become comfortable with mixed-use projects that combine housing with uses like stores, offices, and restaurants.
Commercial lenders also need to change their practices to enable more walkable development, as Highsmith’s experience in Oklahoma City demonstrates. According to Matthew Adair, one major barrier standing in the way is that bankers’ decisions about what to finance are influenced by their subjective opinions about cultural norms.
“A lot of bankers have a certain lifestyle, and they think that the residents in the buildings they fund are going to want to have a certain lifestyle,” he said. “So it’s really about kind of poking at that perception that having a car is kind of ‘normal’ in the U.S. and anything other than that is ‘alternative,’ so the alternative is inherently riskier than the normal.”
Difficult but not impossible
While these and related hurdles are steep, they can be overcome, as projects like Oklahoma City’s Wheeler District demonstrate.
Built on the site of a former airport close to the city center, the neighborhood, which has been planned and constructed over the past two decades, was designed to be walkable and bikeable, with houses, townhomes, and apartments located in close proximity to shops, restaurants, a school, and other amenities.
Highsmith, who designed a mixed-use project there, said that the Wheeler District’s success owes much to developer Blair Humphreys, a member of a wealthy and prominent family (his father is a former mayor of Oklahoma City) who holds a master’s degree in urban planning from MIT. Humphreys’s local standing has allowed him to achieve what many others have not, Highsmith said.
“With city approvals in hand, and with [his] long history and relationship with lending partners, the projects in this area are some of the only new ground-up developments that we see that require no new parking,” he wrote in an email.
Of course, this is not a scalable solution to car dependence; well-connected urban planners aren’t rushing to improve walkability in most American neighborhoods. Instead, meaningful change will require sustained engagement from many different groups.
As 1000 Friends of Oregon’s TOD report suggested, the difficulty of such efforts shouldn’t stop people from trying.
“This is not a call for stakeholders to shake their fists, gnash their teeth, and succumb to the notion that these things are impossible or futile,” he wrote. “Rather, it is a call to action that acknowledges the need for incremental legwork from all stakeholders over the course of many years to change any of these problems.”
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